schools. Sound
doctrine was preached on the need of the children for substantial and
warm noon meals, and the comparative ease and economy with which such
luncheons could be provided at the school house. Children can of course
be better and more cheaply fed as a group than as isolated units
supplied with a cold home-prepared lunch box. And yet with the whole
machinery of the state in his hands, Adam's commissions, backed by the
people's money, goad mother on to isolated endeavor. She plants and
weeds and harvests. She dries and cans, preserves and pickles. Then she
calculates and perchance finds that her finished product is not always
of the best and has often cost more than if purchased in the
open market.

It may be the truest devotion to our Allies to challenge the
individualistic role recommended by Adam to mother, for it will hinder,
not help, the feeding of the world to put women back under eighteenth
century conditions. Food is short and expensive because labor is short.
And even when the harvest is ripe, the saving of food cannot be set as a
separate and commendable goal, and the choice as to where labor shall be
expended as negligible. It is a prejudiced devotion to mother and her
ways which leads Adam in his food pamphlets to advise that a woman shall
sit in her chimney corner and spend time peeling a peach "very thin,"
when hundreds of bushels of peaches rot in the orchards for lack of
hands to pick them.

Just how wide Adam's Eve has opened the gate of Eden and looked out into
the big world is not entirely clear, but probably wide enough to glimpse
the fact that all the advice Adam has recently given to her runs counter
to man's method of achievement. Men have preached to one another for a
hundred years and more and practiced so successfully the concentration
in industry of unlimited machinery with a few hands, that even mother
knows some of the truths in regard to the creation of wealth in the
business world, and she is probably not incapable of drawing a
conclusion from her own experience in the transfer of work from the
home to the factory.

If they are city dwellers, women have seen bread and preserves
transferred; if farm dwellers, they have seen the curing of meat and
fish transferred, the making of butter and cheese. They know that
because of this transfer the home is cleaner and quieter, more people
better fed and clothed, and the hours of the factory worker made shorter
than those "mother used